Murderers and Other Friends

by John Mortimer

  And that, so far as I can recall, is how it was living through a murder trial. Years later I put some element of Jimmy O’Neill’s trial into a Rumpole story, so fact became fiction. On another strange occasion a fictional murder ended up as fact. I wanted Rumpole to appear at a court martial and, as I had never been engaged in such a proceeding, I went off to the British Army in Germany to see how it worked. I was shown great hospitality by the Judge Advocate’s office and taken to see the trial of a young guardsman accused of smoking a cannabis cigarette. An interesting point of law arose because the only evidence of what was in the cigarette was what he said at the time, and he might have been boasting or lying or just having everyone on. I learnt the procedure of a court martial and then I came home to write my Rumpole story.

  It was called ‘The Bright Seraphim’ and it concerned a court martial for murder in a guards regiment. I started the story with what I thought was a dramatic image: a British sergeant-major is lying, stabbed through the heart, outside a disco in a small German town. The bloodstains were not immediately visible as, instead of his uniform, the sergeant was wearing a long, bright-red evening-gown. The story was written and, in due course, televised.

  Years later I was invited to dinner with the Queen’s Guard in Germany. It was an extremely pleasant occasion organized by an assistant adjutant whose name was Delia. Before dinner she suggested I might like to have a drink in the Sergeants Mess. One of the sergeants looked over his pint and said, ‘Were you ever out with the army in Germany before?’ ‘Oh, yes,’ I told them, ‘I came out to see a court martial. It was quite an interesting case, actually. A young guardsman was accused of smoking cannabis and the only evidence against him was that he said it was a joint.’ ‘That wasn’t the case!’ An older, no doubt more important, sergeant corrected me. ‘You came over here because of that murder we had. You know, the one where a sergeant-major was found stabbed outside a disco? And him wearing some tart’s red evening-dress.’

  Chapter 3

  I’m giving a talk at lunch-time. It’s not especially well attended, but a man has come to interview me for a radio programme. He sits in the front row, an elderly, untidy person with a haversack full of documents. After the talk he takes me up in a creaking, coffin-like lift to an empty office. He produces an old tape-recorder which is about the size of a portable wireless in the days when they were substantial instruments. He strikes it with his fist and its red light flickers find then glows sullenly. By way of warm-up he tells me the following story. His grandfather used to act in melodrama at the old Lyric, Hammersmith, and played star roles. At the end of one of these performances he was holding an actress playing his wife, recently dead. ‘My wife is dead in my arms’, was the line this old actor had to sob out to the front of the house. ‘What shall I doo – oo?’ A voice from the gallery answered, ‘Screw her while she’s still warm!’ For some reason this story endeared my interviewer to me but he managed to chill our relationship by delving into the haversack and bringing out a battered typescript. ‘And this’ – he flourished it proudly – ‘is what they’re going to say about you on the radio on the day you die. I thought it would be great fun if you read it out during our interview. It starts: “John Mortimer was I stopped him there. Why? Because I might be in danger of believing it? Or because I prefer not to dwell on thoughts of death?

  Another part of life started for me with Penny, more than twenty-three years younger but considerably more sensible than I. We met at a New Year’s Eve party. Our wedding might be considered unromantic by some. I was in the middle of a trial when a member of the jury asked if he might have a day off because his mother-in-law had died and he wanted to attend the funeral. I then rang Penny and said we were having a free day because of the juryman’s mother-in-law. Might it be possible to book the Harrow Road register office on the date of the funeral, which also happened to be my birthday and we were having a party? It was free and we were married.

  It was the start of the seventies, the vanished age of flower power and headbands, Nehru jackets and Afghan waistcoats, protests against the Vietnam War and posters in bed-sitting rooms advising their occupants, who had no intention of fighting anyone, to Make Love Not War. It was a time when no one young thought they would have the least difficulty finding a job, and that society would inevitably become more tolerant, liberal and humane.

  It was also a time for numberless underground magazines. These publications, printed in pink on darker pink paper, or in green on green, were full of rude cartoons and vaguely anti-establishment opinions. They were also hard to decipher and enjoyed the smallest of circulations. Richard Neville started such a magazine called Oz when he was a student in Australia. He and Oz came to England and in due course a ‘Schoolkids’ edition was published, which had apparently been largely written by children and young people. It contained attacks both on the Vietnam War and school dinners and a cartoon in which Rupert Bear, the somewhat boring hero of a respectable children’s comic strip, was depicted in a high state of sexual excitement. There followed a lengthy trial at the Old Bailey in which the editors were charged with corrupting the morals of young people, the offence which led to Socrates drinking hemlock. A large number of doctors and psychiatrists gave evidence and made lengthy speeches. At the end, the Oz editors were convicted on certain charges and sent to prison, to be released a few days later by the Court of Appeal which overruled all but one minor conviction.

  During the Oz case Penny sat below the dock, a slim girl with an unmistakably swollen stomach. When the trial was over, we went to stay with Tony Richardson. He had directed John Osborne’s plays, Look Back in Anger and The Entertainer, at the Royal Court Theatre and had made, it was said, a million pounds – a sum which made us gasp with amazement – out of Tom Jones. He invited us to the South of France to discuss writing a film. When we arrived, he took us to lunch at a restaurant on a gay beach near St Tropez where heterosexual couples, particularly when one of them was young, wearing a bikini and very pregnant, were looked upon with as much approval as a couple of Sikhs entering the Club Bar in the heyday of the British Raj. This was the first of a long series of visits to Tony’s house, his cluster of houses, his hamlet, his village, hidden away among the cork trees on a hillside near La Garde Freinet. However described, it was a place of undoubted magic and he ruled it with the absolute and arbitrary power of Prospero, producing – to deter the ever-present threat of boredom – tempests, quarrels, misalliances, scandals, seductions and betrayals, which only occasionally won through to the happy ending of Shakespeare’s last play.

  Tony was a tall, angular man whose long limbs were curiously uncoordinated; but he was resolutely, if not always successfully, athletic. He only learnt to swim in middle life and, although he spent more hours practising on the tennis court than Nastase before Wimbledon, he was easily beaten by a one-armed player who had to throw the ball into the air and then grab his racket from between his legs when he served. Tony spoke in a curious nasal drawl, much imitated by his friends and acquaintances, and specialized, as had my father, in saying outrageous things which you would have been unwise to take seriously. Once, when Penny was seeing me off at the airport on some misguided trip to Hollywood, he said to her, ‘I suppose you hope the plane crashes, don’t you, darling, and you’ll be left a nice rich little widow?’

  His normal expression was one of amused contempt but he was capable of great enthusiasm. When he was richly entertained, usually at some disaster, he would double up and massage his thighs with bony fingers, gulping with laughter. He was also extraordinarily generous. The long table, set out for lunch in front of the house, where the cook and the cleaning lady and a crowd of children all sat down with Nureyev, Jeanne Moreau, Lee Radziwill or John Gielgud, never seemed to be laid for fewer than twenty people. He once, while filming in Australia, lent his house to a dress designer who ran up a debt of ten thousand pounds on Tony’s account at the St Tropez grocer’s. He paid it without a murmur and only regretted doing so when he tried
to telephone the couturier on some quite different subject and his calls were never returned. For all his appearance of lofty cynicism his children adored him, he was loyal to his friends and he managed to produce, in the house he lived in, a curiously potent magic.

  The place was called Le Nid du Duc after an owl that must have made its nest there. I suppose it’s the smell I remember most: the pungent scent of log fires, coffee, herbs, lavender and cooking. The group of houses, straggling down the wooded hillside towards the big swimming-pool Tony had built with the proceeds of directing a Mr Potato Chip commercial, were dominated by the main farmhouse which was wonderfully untidy. In the living-room, the cushions, the sofa and the chairs had been chewed by a large number of whippets, thin and adventurous as their master, who would travel vast distances through the woods and return, exhausted, to sleep by the fire. Last night’s half-empty wine glasses, cards scattered after the game of bridge which Tony played with great daring and withering contempt for his opponents and partners, and pages of half-read and rejected scripts, littered the place. Doves fluttered around the house until one day Tony issued an imperious order that they should be slaughtered and served up to us at lunch. They proved to have been more enjoyable alive.

  I had heard stories of guests being asked by Tony to have dinner in the village on chosen nights so that ‘we can all talk about you’ but nothing like that happened when we were staying. He did, however, greatly enjoy dramas. If things were getting a little slow and if Prospero were to experience moments of boredom, his servant – major-domo, butler or chief steward – could be guaranteed to provide an entertaining diversion. Jean-Pierre was by no means a Caliban. He was small and dark, with a face like some angelic youth in the background of an Italian painting. Tony, who had found him scratching a living as a pavement artist in Toulon, gave him a home, a car and a job well suited to his talents. At times he was unreliable, being what Tony described darkly as ‘on the sauce’. He would occasionally expose himself to the children, who were completely unimpressed by what he had to show them and would urge him, in a bored manner, to put it away. However, he was ready and willing to make love to persons of either sex in order to provide much-needed excitement. When one upper-crust married lady was changing for dinner, he emerged unexpectedly from under the bed and was, apparently, received with enthusiasm. He was often charming, frequently entertaining, although he hated having to bring in the groceries and the wine in a wheelbarrow after one of Tony’s gigantic shopping sprees. On such occasions he would tell us what a con the patron was. Once he was removed to prison in Draguignan for some motoring offence, where he played cards all day and said he had never been so happy.

  Jean-Pierre’s end came with far too much drama. He quarrelled violently with his girlfriend and Tony found him in possession of a loaded automatic rifle, which he had bought quite easily in Cogolin. The patron, like some gaunt hero in a western, walked down the main street of La Garde Freinet to hand this weapon in to the police. Jean-Pierre soon replaced the gun, and, after another scene with his girlfriend in Toulon, shot her and then himself. She escaped with a superficial wound but he died, slowly and painfully. He was, without doubt, melancholy, dangerous and unbalanced. But during those early Easters and brilliant summers he had seemed essential to the spirit of the place. When he had gone the great days of Le Nid du Duc were over, as surely as the sound of axes marked the destruction of the Cherry Orchard.

  Tony’s hamlet was not a perfect place to work; there were, as you will already have guessed, far too many distractions. One day I was trying to write in the garden when a white cockatoo, which had been off on some private adventure, flew down the wooded valley, alighted on my table and, taking a few delicate steps forward, shat all over my script. I tried not to take the hint. In those days Natasha, now a star, as were Tony and her mother Vanessa Redgrave, was under ten and her sister Joely a couple of years younger. Natasha was always not only an extremely talented actress but businesslike and probably the most sensible character around Le Nid du Duc. Tony would encourage frequent theatrical productions, although his only part in them was to supervise the lighting. It was Natasha who would walk among the guests calling out, ‘Ring! Ring! Time for everyone to come to rehearsal!’ We evolved a play about Saint Tropez, after which the doves (then still alive) were released from dustbins to the strains of the Hallelujah Chorus, causing an effect so exciting that Dominic Elwes, who had been suffering from a bout of impotence, recovered his full powers. Unhappily Mr Elwes had talked too freely to the press about the murder of the Lucan children’s nanny and, having been sent to Coventry by Lord Lucan’s friends, he committed suicide.

  We also performed Gypsy with the young Natasha as Mama Rosa, Joely as Gypsy, and Penny performing in the chorus with Helen Osborne, Jacqueline Rufus Isaacs and a transvestite from Milan. When these productions were over, we composed reviews of them in the manner of Harold Hobson and Ken Tynan, the dramatic critics of the period. The notices had to be dreadful; Tony would not have been amused by success.

  Mealtimes often produced dramas and could be discussed and analysed in detail afterwards. There was an elderly economist, often on the telephone in the café in La Garde Freinet advising Harold Wilson on the British economy, who would turn up at Le Nid du Duc in extremely baggy shorts. The grass around the lunch table was always scattered with rubbish, bones abandoned by the dogs and bits of dead animals. Seated opposite the economist, a girl grasped a chicken’s severed claw between her toes and inserted it, gently and cunningly, up his voluminous shorts. When the yellow leg was in position she scratched his private parts with it. This entertained her neighbours and caused the flattered victim to believe, with delight, that the elderly lady at his side was making a pass at him. After this, Tony was able to massage his thighs, choke with laughter and feel that the day had not been entirely wasted.

  One night a French movie actress whose beauty I had long admired was invited to dinner. The evening was uneventful, Tony was bored and we went to bed early. At breakfast, much to our surprise, he was in a mood of bubbling delight. At about two in the morning, it seemed, the exquisite actress had thrown a glass ashtray at her boyfriend’s head and he had to be taken to the hospital in St Tropez to receive several stitches. ‘The marvellous part was,’ Tony told us, ‘he said she usually held on to the things she hit him with, but this time she let go and it was much worse.’

  I was first invited down to discuss a film version of I Claudius and Claudius the God, books which I have always admired. Then Tony decided to do them as a stage play and ‘go for broke’ by bringing it straight into the West End. I wrote what I thought was a chamber piece with parts doubled by a fairly small cast of actors. Tony kept on getting new ideas. He stripped the cork trees of bark which he had painted blue to make armour for the Ancient Britons. He decided that the set should consist entirely of ‘bleachers’, the sort of steps which are erected for an audience at sporting events or presidential inaugurations. He said that the spaces between the steps should correspond to those in front of South American temples where ‘little Inca priests had to jump up and down’. He invited the leading players to Le Nid du Duc where they drank champagne and rehearsed round the pool. These rehearsals were an unmitigated delight.

  I was surprised, when we got to London, to find that the full cast consisted of about thirty actors and many of my lines had been transferred to characters for whom I hadn’t intended them. However, the rehearsals continued to look promising, kept alive by Tony’s endless enthusiasm and flow of invention. He gave a party at his house in London before the first night, at which I sat on a sofa between Jo Grimond, the former leader of the Liberal Party, and Robert Graves, who was immensely handsome, with the sort of head you might expect to find on a Greek statue or a Roman coin. There was a lull in the conversation and then Graves said, ‘Of course Jesus Christ lived to the age of eighty, went to China and discovered spaghetti.’

  ‘In which Gospel,’ Jo Grimond was puzzled, ‘do we learn that Jesus
Christ discovered spaghetti?’

  ‘In no Gospel.’ Graves was smiling. ‘It’s simply a matter of common knowledge.’

  Jo Grimond was wise enough to ask no further questions on that subject, but when the legendary writer said, ‘Keats wasn’t a great poet. He couldn’t be because he was not a gent,’ Grimond uttered another mild protest. ‘I didn’t think you had to be a gent, to be a great poet.’

  ‘There, sir,’ Graves told him firmly, ‘you are wrong!’

  I broke another prolonged silence by asking what Robert Graves had done in the last war. Was he, perhaps, in some secret service? We all knew, from Goodbye to All That, of his experiences in the First World War.

  ‘In the last war,’ he said, quite without boasting, ‘I won the Battle of Anzio. Shall I tell you how I did it?’ Jo Grimond said he thought we’d be very glad to know.

  ‘Well, I was bicycling round the island of Jersey,’ Graves told us, ‘and I met an officer from my old regiment. I asked him what he was doing and he said he was off to fight the Eyeties at the Battle of Anzio. So I said if he’d give me time to ride round a little more I’d come back to him, in say half an hour, and tell him my plan for defeating the Eyeties.’

  ‘And did you?’

  ‘Oh, yes. I rode around and thought it all out and then I came back. My officer was still there and I said to him, “Look here, I’ve thought out a perfect plan. Let me tell you the secret of the Eyeties. They cannot stand the sound of a woman in labour. If he hears the sound of a woman in labour your average Eyetie will run a mile. So all you have to do is to go down to Queen Charlotte’s Hospital and record the cries of women in labour. Then play them on your gramophones on the beaches and every Eyetie soldier will run a mile.” Well, he did and they did, and that is exactly how we won the Battle of Anzio.’